You've learned the basic algorithms now and are ready to step into the area of more complex problems and algorithms to solve them. Advanced algorithms build upon basic ones and use new ideas. We will start with networks flows which are used in more typical applications such as optimal matchings, finding disjoint paths and flight scheduling as well as more surprising ones like image segmentation in computer vision. We then proceed to linear programming with applications in optimizing budget allocation, portfolio optimization, finding the cheapest diet satisfying all requirements and many others. Next we discuss inherently hard problems for which no exact good solutions are known (and not likely to be found) and how to solve them in practice. We finish with a soft introduction to streaming algorithms that are heavily used in Big Data processing. Such algorithms are usually designed to be able to process huge datasets without being able even to store a dataset.

From the lesson

Flows in Networks

Network flows show up in many real world situations in which a good needs to be transported across a network with limited capacity. You can see it when shipping goods across highways and routing packets across the internet. In this unit, we will discuss the mathematical underpinnings of network flows and some important flow algorithms. We will also give some surprising examples on seemingly unrelated problems that can be solved with our knowledge of network flows.